I looked for death but I couldn't find it,' a Nigerian town relives the brutal civil war, 50 years after it ended

A young officer orders an attack during the Biafra conflict in Nigeria in 1969

Oguta, Nigeria(CNN)Evelyn Okororie had just returned home from the market in Nigeria's Midwest region, when neighbors informed her that an airstrike had killed her mother, her niece and three of her children. .


The year was 1969, and it was two months before the end of the brutal two-year Nigeria-Biafra war, which killed an estimated one to three million people, mostly from the Igbo tribe in the eastern part of the country.


It was said to be the world's first televised war and the haunting images of starving children caught in a civil war shocked the world.


Oguta, Nigeria(CNN)Evelyn Okororie had just returned home from the market in Nigeria's Midwest region, when neighbors informed her that an airstrike had killed her mother, her niece and three of her children. .


The year was 1969, and it was two months before the end of the brutal two-year Nigeria-Biafra war, which killed an estimated one to three million people, mostly from the Igbo tribe in the eastern part of the country.


It was said to be the world's first televised war and the haunting images of starving children caught in a civil war shocked the world.


Protests were held around the world and Bruce Mayrock, a student at Columbia University, set himself on fire at the United Nations headquarters in New York to protest the war in Biafra.


Beatles singer John Lennon returned his MBE in a protest over Britain's foreign policy, which included Biafra and the Vietnam war.


Okororie recalls that she and her seven children had taken refuge in Oguta, a lakeside town near a local airport, which served as Biafra's major supply line for arms and relief materials from international charities.


But tragedy struck when Nigerian combatants launched an airstrike.


"The bomb fell on my older brother's house," Okororie said of the missile that missed its target, an adjacent military encampment.


"My mother died with three of my children, two boys, and a girl," she told CNN.


Okororie says she wished she had died, too. "I looked for death but I couldn't find it."


Now in her 80s, Okororie is one of the millions of civilians who lived in what was then Biafra -- a secessionist state carved out from Nigeria's southeast in 1967.


A high ranking military officer called Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu led the breakaway republic.


Ojukwu, the son of a wealthy businessman, studied history at Oxford University. He returned to Nigeria in 1955 after his graduation and later joined the army where he was eventually appointed military governor of the eastern region of Nigeria, mostly inhabited by Igbo people.


Ojukwu declared independence for the Republic of Biafra in 1966 following a spate of violence that occurred in the north of Nigeria against Igbo people.


The Nigerian government at the time opposed secession, which ensued after failed talks on reconciliation. This led to a divisive and bitter war from 1967 to 1970.


The horrors of war


Okororie says she abandoned her clothing business in Port-Harcourt city, where she resided before the start of the war and fled with her seven children to Oguta as Nigerian soldiers advanced on the city in the Biafran territory.


"People were running. We were being shelled from everywhere," she said, recalling the day Nigerian combatants reached the city.


She says they walked all day and survived only on achara, a vegetable similar to a leek, until they got to their destination. "Pregnant women were left behind by their husbands as they gave birth, " she added.


The war ended 50 years ago on 15th January 1970 when Ojukwu fled the country. He left for exile in Ivory Coast and spent many years in the West African country before he was pardoned by Shehu Shagari, Nigeria's first democratically elected president in 1982.


Nigeria reabsorbed Biafra at the end of the war, in a 'no victor, no vanquished,' policy, which some Igbos believe has led to near-collective amnesia of the civil war in the country.


However, it is a period Okororie says she can never forget.


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